There was no news of Idle’s return from Africa. As the Nativity Play drew nearer Emily began to fret. Fen’s promises that somehow he would manage to be there were no consolation. She needed positive assurance. As it was, the anxiety began to detract from the pleasure of rehearsals, the excitement.
It wasn’t till the morning of the play itself that a telegram arrived : all being well, Idle planned to arrive at the airport just in time for Fen to drive him straight to the school. Emily’s relief and delight were boundless. She ran off through the snowy garden singing to herself, shaking branches of the trees as she went. Some of their snow fell around her in small showers, but laughing out loud, she scarcely felt their wet or cold on her cheeks.
At school, everything was wonderfully abnormal. In the Hall, the Christmas tree was lit with blue and green bulbs, giving the place an unfamiliar and mysterious glow. Miss Curtis played the morning hymn with trembling fingers and great nicety of feeling, while on the bosom of her crochet cardigan bobbed a posy of plastic holly and tinsel fern. Miss Neal, a character less swayed into celebration of annual events, in spite of her dedication of the spirit of the Nativity, made only one concession to the importance of the day: a hairnet sprinkled with tiny diamonds. While the headmistress asked in her confident voice that God should bring peace into the hearts of parents and children, Emily, screwing up her eyes in the black cup of her hands, prayed that she wouldn’t stumble over her lines : and by the time the many requests to the Lord were over fresh snow was flowering against the glass of the grey windows.
The seniors were allowed to change first – lucky things, as Emily said to Sandra – almost directly after lunch. From the door of her classroom Emily watched with some envy as they went by: first, the troupe of Dancing Angels, in one- shouldered white tunics. They had gleaming pink lips and haloes of small lacquered stars, whose wire structure, carefully hidden in their hair, could just be observed from behind. They carried their huge gold wings, ready to put them on at the last moment. Meantime, wingless, they were trusted to spend a quiet hour in the library, reading, still as possible so as to cause no creases.
Then came the kings and shepherds, in rough and bright Eastern clothes. Their faces had been made up by the art teacher, whose talent and experience had taught her what looked impressive from a distance. Close to, their livid brown skins and wild black brows were almost clownish, though their eyes remained solemn. Finally, Mary. Jennifer Plomber, ace of the netball field, transformed to an unimaginable gentleness of bearing. She came up the steps, navy school mackintosh flung carelessly over her long, blue cloak, twinkling with snow. As she lifted her long skirts, showing a flash of wet gumboot, she smiled at Emily. Emily returned a sighing smile, and counted the years.
Finally, the Children by the Manger were allowed to exchange their uniforms for their simple dancing tunics, garlanded only with strands of real ivy over their shoulders. They pinned these sprays on to each other, fingers unusually clumsy, and squealed as the cold leaves touched their bare arms. The room in which they gathered behind the stage smelt of sweat. The floor beneath their feet was ice. The first carol, muffled by the curtains, began.
When the time came for Emily’s solo, she was calm and untrembling. Alone on the steps leading to the stage, a spotlight in her eyes, she listened to her voice funnelling into the quiet blackness of the audience. At the end of her verse they applauded. (Miss Neal had said they would do no such thing until the very end : it would spoil the atmosphere.) As Emily stepped down to the side of the stage, containing her pleasure in the slightest flicker of a smile, a booming voice from the back of Hall quickly came to the rescue of that atmosphere, cutting short the applause.
‘… And suddenly, there were with the shepherds, the angels of the Lord, praising God and saying …’
The stage curtains snapped back. There they were, the dazzling bank of Dancing Angels, piled up on their hidden chairs and step ladders, paper trumpets to the ready at their mouths, wings and haloes a-glitter: the results of all their rehearsals triumphant now, as they kept their tableau of uncanny stillness. Before them, on the ground, the shepherds were twisted into ingenious positions of fear, equally frozen.
‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ shouted the angels, breaking the dramatic tension, and the smallest shepherd, overcome, dropped his crook with a great thud. Under cover of all this activity Emily glanced quickly at the dim faces of the audience. Unable to see her parents, she hastily lowered her eyes again. This was an occasion when make-believe worked for her. The Angels, ordinary school girls any other day of the year, conjured a strange wonder on the stage. And as the next carol filled the Hall an old and private world of clear midnights and snowbound stars, which flames the dullest soul at Christmas, dazed Emily, until cramp struck her leg, God’s holiness receded a little, and she came back to reality.
One of the few advantages of being a Child by the Manger was that, not being required for the final tableau, they were able to change first, and thus find their parents first when the performance was over. The great surge of parental pride that burst forth with the final curtain – applause and tears in almost equal measure, therefore went unheeded by the Children. They were already in the basement cloakroom, ripping off their ivy-ed tunics and leaving them in blue pools on the stone floor, as they clamoured with excitement, impatient for anticipated praise. Emily was one of the first to race back to the Hall. Brightly lit by the tree and other lights, the awe of so short a while ago quite scattered now, jabbering parents stood thickly together, united in their feelings. Almost at once Emily saw Fen. She stood by the piano in a long, mustard velvet cloak, a black scarf swathed over her head, rather in the fashion of the shepherds. Emily quickly pushed towards her. Fen smiled at once, and bent down to kiss her.
‘Darling, you were absolutely marvellous.’
‘Where’s Papa?’ asked Emily, looking round.
‘I’ll tell you. Let’s go.’
Fen took Emily’s hand. They made their way out of the Hall and into the drive. There, small gusts of snow blew into their faces.
‘What happened to him?’
‘No one could help it,’ said Fen, ‘but his aeroplane was delayed. He rang me from the airport in Capetown. He was dreadfully upset.’
Emily stopped. For a moment she watched the snow pile up on the toes of her boots. Then she said :
‘But I wanted him to come,’ and buried her head in her mother’s shoulder.
‘I know, I know. But there was nothing he could do. He’ll be back very late tonight. He’ll be there when you wake up in the morning.’
Emily felt a shudder go right through her body. She detached herself from the warmth of her mother. She could think of nothing to say.
They walked a few paces up the slight incline of the drive till they came to the windows of the Hall. There, at Emily’s instigation, they paused again. They looked in. Mothers and fathers greeted their children with shouts and gestures of congratulation, laughing and smiling.
‘It was so good, too,’ said Fen. The circle of snow in which she stood was grapefruit coloured from the lights inside. Emily, turning from the scene in the Hall and looking up at her, saw that her black scarf merged into the night sky, its long ends billowing among the clouds, and her face was pale but distinct. ‘Marcia Burrows is waiting for us in the car,’ Fen added.
‘Marcia Burrows? Why’s she come?’
‘She was going to be all ready for Papa’s return so that she could get on with whatever he wanted done right away.’ Fen paused. ‘Kevin’s there too. He didn’t think you’d mind. He so wanted to see you …’
Emily let her eyes fall from her mother’s face to her cloak. It was the ugliest colour she had ever seen. A sickly, hideous colour against the snow.
‘I didn’t want Kevin to come,’ she said.
‘He thought you were—’
‘I didn’t want him or Miss Burrows. I didn’t want anyone but you and Papa.’
‘Oh, Em.’ Fen shifted her feet, cold. ‘There was nothing anyone could do, you know. I thought – ’
‘Whatever you thought, you thought wrong,’ Emily shouted. Snow blew into her mouth. ‘But anyhow, it doesn’t matter because it was an awful play and I was terrible and I wish I hadn’t been in it.’ She swung back to the windows of the Hall, hunching her shoulders. ‘Look in there!‘
Fen stepped towards her.
‘It doesn’t look to me as if there are many fathers, in fact, darling.’
‘I don’t care. I wanted Papa to come.’ Suddenly she pressed her head against the glass pane and felt the snow that had lodged there crowd against her forehead. ‘All I wanted in the whole world was for you and Papa to come.’
Fen tugged at her arm.
‘Come on, Em. It’s so cold. Please.’
Emily didn’t resist. She no longer cared what she did, whether the snow covered her completely, or she died of cold, anything.
‘I was praying not to forget my words,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even think I should be praying for the aeroplane to get here on time, or for Marcia Burrows and Kevin McCloud not to come.’
‘Don’t go on,’ said Fen, a little desperate, ‘there are so many other years.’
Emily hadn’t seen Kevin since the weekend in the north. He sat in the back seat of the car, Marcia Burrows beside him.
‘Congratulations,’ she said at once. ‘You were quite a little star, dear.’ She wore an angora beret pulled down over one eye, angora gloves to match.
‘Well done,’ said Kevin. ‘We enjoyed it.’ Emily said nothing.
Fen drove cautiously to the station-it was still snowing, and settling quite deeply. Kevin left for London with a final tribute to Emily’s performance, but still she did not respond.
Her spirits remained dulled for the rest of the evening. Silently, she noticed that on this visit Marcia Burrows seemed a little easier, more at home. She took out her knitting, after a glass of sherry, without asking Fen’s permission, and chattered on about how comparatively lucky were the birds of Holland Park during a hard winter. So many people seemed keen to feed them. She herself went there most Saturday mornings, with a small bag of special bird food, though of course priority was for the few sparrows, almost tame now, who came to her house in Olympia.
Soon after supper Fen left for the airport, telling Emily to go to bed. She doubted whether she would be back much before midnight in this weather. She wrapped herself up in her cloak and scarf again, and took a torch to the door. Emily knelt at the window and watched the timeless shape of her mother, guided by the thin beam, bent against the flurrying snow. She felt a moment’s anxiety. But the feeling, settling as it did on the surface of the baser sadnesses of the last few hours, was lightweight. By the time she sat at the fire once more, it had gone, to be replaced by a great longing for tomorrow.
She watched the fire. Marcia Burrows’ needles clicked with a definite rhythm. Her ankles were crossed on the floor. The green sage stuff of her skirt just covered her knees. She had straight, thinnish, dull legs, the kind that look easiest in walking shoes. Her fingers had beautifully polished nails -short but shining. There was something reassuring about her appearance : a firmness, a sense of constancy, and responsibility, not immediately apparent when you first encountered her slight frame, and were impressed only by its neatness. Looking at her now, Emily understood why the sparrows kept on going back to her house: she would see to it they always found crumbs. Also, decided Emily, she had rather a nice face. Especially when she thought no one was looking at her. It was only when people questioned her, paid her attention, that her features recoiled almost imperceptibly, leaving her with an expression of anticipated disapproval, or perhaps it was caution. At least she wasn’t bossy and interfering. She said nothing about bed. Instead, after a while, she remarked how good she thought the play.
‘It must have taken months of rehearsal to get it up to that standard. That girl, whoever she was, who played Mary. She was especially good. And yet I couldn’t help thinking … in fact I said to myself, I said : my, I’m sure that girl isn’t at all a Mary character. I’m sure she’s good at netball, or something like that.’
Emily sat up, respect increased.
‘How did you know that?’
‘What?’
‘That she’s netball captain?’
‘I didn’t know, of course.’ Marcia Burrows smiled. ‘I was only guessing. But there was something about her, the way she sat over the crib. It seemed to me her natural inclination was to pounce, jump high. Her cloak and halo couldn’t hide her sportswoman’s body. She must be the first Mary I’ve ever seen whose problem was to contain, not her body, but her mind. I felt, should a whistle suddenly blow, she’d be the first to leap up, and damn the baby in the cradle!’ Emily smiled. ‘That’s why she was so good, you see. All those spirits, contained, made her calm much more effective. Some genuinely dull girl with a placid face wouldn’t have been the same thing at all.’
Marcia Burrows was quite animated. Emily watched as two pink spots, at first quite small, spread rapidly over the entire plains of her cheeks. Her sudden warmth made Emily bold.
‘Do you disapprove of anything?’ she asked.
‘Well, of course. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes you look very disapproving, like at supper when Mama stubbed out her cigarette on her plate. Then just a little while later you say all those nice things about the play, and you guess right about Jennifer Plomber which I don’t suppose even Uncle Tom would have done.’ Marcia Burrows smiled but didn’t reply. ‘So what do you disapprove of?’
Marcia thought for a while.
‘Obvious big things,’ she said finally. ‘And then, on an everyday level, the things they spring from. Unkindness, for instance.’ She paused again. ‘And some methods of kindness.’ Her mouth shortened.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you really want to know? Well, simply, when there’s a choice in a way of doing things, I believe in absolute honesty from the start. Of concealing nothing. It saves so much …’
Suddenly her ball of wool fell from her lap and skittered across the floor. She reacted with a look of sadness out of all proportion to the happening. Emily returned the ball to her lap, not quite understanding, nor indeed wanting Marcia Burrows to go on. She tried a new subject.
‘Are you going to get married ?’
‘Oh yes, I hope so. One day.’ Marcia Burrows managed a real smile.
‘My mother married Papa when she was very young, you know.’
‘Your mother is a very beautiful woman. Gay and clever, too.’
‘I know.’
‘We don’t all have that good fortune.’
‘Oh, I think you’re quite clever. Mama can’t knit like you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyhow, I think you’d be a good wife to someone.’ Again Marcia Burrows smiled. ‘Has no one ever asked you?’
After a pause Miss Burrows replied, quite brusquely. ‘Do you want to know proper grown-up answers to all these questions, Emily?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, then, if you really want to know, a man did propose to me once. He was called Derek and he had one leg longer than the other.’ Emily giggled. ‘But I didn’t want to marry him-nothing to do with the leg, of course. He just wasn’t very – prepossessing, if you know what I mean. There was nothing you could put your finger on and say : that’s Derek.’
‘So what about the man you did want to marry?’
Marcia looked up, startled.
‘How did you know about him?’
‘How did you know about Jennifer Plomber?’
‘There’s not very much to say about him.’ Marcia had found a new, resigned voice. ‘We spent some happy times. He was good to me. But he didn’t know how to tell me he loved someone else more. He tried not to hurt me, but of course I found out. By that time there wasn’t much left for me … I don’t attract friends,’ she added. ‘There wasn’t a crowd of supporting people to turn to, was there? Just the knowledge that all the time he’d been someone else’s, not mine.’ A tear suddenly ran from one eye down her cheek. Emily was startled.
‘Miss Burrows!’
‘Forgive me, child. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what made me talk like that.’
‘Do you want me to fetch you a handkerchief?’
Miss Burrows shook her head. ‘Really, thank you. I usually have one. Now, it’s time you went to bed. Your mother said. I shall do just a couple more rows and go myself.’
Emily got up.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, ‘if I made you cry.’
‘It was nothing to do wtih you, dear. As my mother always said, the quickest way to self-pity is a glass of sherry. Now, up you go.’
Emily bent down and kissed her, carefully choosing the cheek without the tear.
‘Papa’ll be back in the morning,’ she said.
‘That’s good,’ said Miss Burrows. ‘You’re lucky to have such a nice father, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Emily.
She couldn’t sleep. She lay, eyes open, thinking of Marcia Burrows and her odd-legged admirer. Perhaps he had run after her shouting his proposal behind her, only of course he wouldn’t have stood a chance of catching her up if she had been going fast. So after a while he would have had to have given up, sit on a bench and get his breath, and wonder what to do next. If he had decided to go along to her house and knock on her door, would she have slammed it in his face ? Or would she have asked him in to tea and called him ‘dear’ as if nothing had happened, as if he had never chased her round the park, people laughing, people shouting? That chase he was bound to lose. Perhaps it was a bit mean of Marcia Burrows to say no to Derek if she really didn’t mind about his leg. Surely she would have been better off with a man with a limp than no man at all? She didn’t look particularly happy on her own. And she ought to be happy because she was a nice woman. Kind. Gentle. She wouldn’t frighten any sort of man, as perhaps Mama would. No one could imagine a man with a limp chasing after her. Wouldn’t dare. Well, it would be silly. All her boyfriends before she married Papa, she once said, were young Lochinvars who swept her off her feet to exciting places before she had time to say no. She had liked that, and she had probably been good to be with once they were at the places. Whereas Marcia Burrows, it had to be admitted, wouldn’t be the most lively person anywhere, however exciting.
The church clock struck twelve. The square of night sky in Emily’s window was filmy still with snow. It was absolutely quiet. Then, immeasurable time later, the noise of the car’s engine.
Emily sat up. She strained her ears. Voices downstairs, but no words. She heard a laugh, Papa’s laugh. He was back, back. The moonlight shapes about her began marvellously to flower : now her room was a ship in a stormy sea pitching towards him-she swayed back and forth. Certainly they wouldn’t capsize. Now it was Aladdin’s cave : she had only to rub her tooth-mug and magically he’d spring up out of the floor. Actually, why wasn’t he coming up to say goodnight to her?
Suddenly impatient, Emily jumped out of bed, crept down the attic stairs and along the passage. She peered over the banisters that led directly into the kitchen. Thus she could see her parents, but they could not see her.
They sat at the kitchen table, Idle at his own place at the end, Fen at one side. They had plates of very hot soup. Emily could see the steam and smell the onions. Idle looked tanned, his hair unusually white against his dark skin. His glasses, which he sometimes wore when he was tired, had slipped down over his nose. Fen wore an apricot coloured jersey with a high neck. It colour, in the candledight, reflected up into her face, making it a summer gold. It was as if she had never experienced etiolation. Her cheeks, pale as they had appeared earlier in the snow, must have been an illusion.
‘So now tell me what you’ve been doing,’ Idle was saying. Fen hesitated.
‘We’ve been mostly here,’ she said. ‘Tom came one weekend. I told you in my letter. He brought Kevin McCloud with him, and some new bird of his called Janie.’
‘Didn’t I ? Well, it wouldn’t have been your kind of weekend. God knows how Tom’ll end up. Each of his blondes is stupider than the last. This one was the epitome.’
‘He doesn’t need any of them, so it doesn’t matter for a while.’
‘No,’ said Fen. She sipped her soup from the bowl.
‘And you. Have you been all right?’ Idle touched her hair.
‘Of course.’
‘It’s the longest I’ve ever been away.’
‘I’ve great reserves of activity,’ Fen smiled. ‘No trouble in filling my days.’
‘I think after all these years I’ve begun to believe you. You really are good at being on your own.’ Fen nodded, hands cupped round her bowl, blowing softly. ‘More than I would be,’ Idle added.
Emily shifted her position on the stair. She was getting cold. She decided soon to go down and surprise them. They couldn’t be cross, not tonight. Idle was pushing his soup away, unhungry, lighting a cigarette.
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘what contortions of the mind distance brings about. Terrible fantasies, quite unreal. Nightmares. Wracked nerves. I’d wake up shaking every morning, for no reason. Quite ridiculous.’ He smiled to himself. Fen raised her eyebrows a little. She sounded concerned.
‘You work so much too hard. You just push yourself and push yourself. One day you’ll go too far. You’ll get an ulcer or have a nervous breakdown.’
‘No, no. Of course I won’t. But I suppose I was overtired. Distress is tiring, and it was distressing. The conditions in the compounds, the feeling of defeat, of utter weariness, the hope almost gone. Then the endless official justification for the way of things. The refusal to have any kind of open mind : the stubborn persistence that within the closed mind lay good reason.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘But those were the living nightmares. The worse ones were about you.’
‘Perhaps if I tell you about them that’ll do the trick of exorcism.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I had a funny instinct that this time I was away too long. That some kind of pressure would be put on you, or you’d be lonely down here, whatever you say – it’s not like when we were in London – or perhaps you wouldn’t miss me. I don’t know.’ He put his hand over Fen’s.
‘Of course I missed you,’ said Fen. ‘So did Emily. Terribly.’
‘Good,’ said Idle quietly. ‘But I shall try never to be away again for so long.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I can never believe, even after ten years’ absolute trust, that you’ll still be there. Every time I come back I gear myself to thinking that my time must surely be up, and you’re off at last with some younger Lochinvar.’ Fen smiled briefly.
‘You are in a bad way,’ she said. ‘Tonight you must take a sleeping pill, and tomorrow I’ll see no one disturbs you.’ She seemed a little brusque, as if she wanted to shake off his mood. Emily, on her stair, stood up. At the same time so did Fen, taking a soup bowl in each hand. Idle looked up at her.
‘Darling love,’ he said. ‘You’re thinner, aren’t you? You haven’t been looking after yourself.’ Fen bent down to him. They kissed lightly.
‘Me not looking after myself,’ she said. ‘I like that.’
Idle, too, got up. He wandered quietly round the room touching things, letting his hands curve over the mound of eggs in a basket: he rubbed an apple on his trousers then returned it to the pile of autumn fruit, he tested the weight of a log then threw it on the fire, and smiled at the instant flames. There was a kind of tired pleasure in his journey. He came to rest at the sink, beside Fen, and put his arm round her shoulders.
‘It’s all the same,’ he said. ‘I must have been quite mad.’
Fen didn’t answer and Idle, hearing a creak on the stairs, looked up. He cried out with surprise, rushed to the bottom of the stairs. Emily threw herself into his arms, speechless. He smelt of faraway sun and familiar blue shirts. He hugged her till laughingly she had to shout to him to stop. Fen turned round quite slowly and smiled at them. Idle at last put Emily down on the rug by the fire.
‘Papa!’
‘You’re awake! ‘
‘I was waiting for you. You’re a funny colour.’
‘Here, shall I get you your present now?’
‘Ooh, yes please.’
From a dark corner of the room Idle brought forth a wooden giraffe – brown spots on pale wood, as tall as Emily herself.
‘An old man in Kenya carved it. They let it sit on the seat beside me on the aeroplane.’
‘It’s lovely,’ said Emily. She touched its nose. ‘Isn’t it, Mama?’
‘Lovely.’ Fen was putting away plates.
‘I’m so sorry about the play, Em,’ said Idle. ‘The wretched aeroplane.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I wasn’t very good, and anyhow.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Fen.
The giraffe was admired for many moments. They all sat on the same armchair and sometimes one of them would stretch out a hand to touch its smooth wooden skin. The room smelt of smoke and onions, and burning apple boughs. Outside, the snow turned to rain and smattered against the windows.
‘Good thing Marcia Burrows is asleep,’ said Emily. ‘Do you know what she told me ? She told me that a man called Derek with one leg miles longer than the other wanted to marry her.’ For some reason this made her parents laugh. She saw them looking at each other, and joined in. When it seemed the laughter might stop Emily sprang from the chair and ran round the room in imitation of someone with a limp, and it flared up again. All the time they could hear the rain.
‘Hope it turns back to snow for Christmas.’ Finally exhausted, Emily flung her arms round the neck of her giraffe.
‘God,’ said Fen quietly, ‘Christmas.’ Suddenly all the gold left her face. She went and knelt by the fire.
‘Your best time of the year,’ said Idle.
‘Maybe.’
‘Only six days. And do you know it’s one o’clock and I’m not at all tired?’ Emily had heard the church clock strike.
‘Well, I most certainly am,’ said Idle. ‘Bed. Come on.’ He picked her up and carried her protesting up the stairs. From the place on his shoulder where she had lain her head she saw the picture of her mother flicker through the banisters, flame shadows on her flame jersey, her face turned up towards them, all smiling again.